Thomas Hawk Blogging About Steve Rubel Blogging About Robert Scoble

Steve Rubel consistently comes up with very insightful material — particularly as blogs relate to PR which is his field.

This time Rubel posts about how Scoble recognizes patterns and trends in his RSS feeds of blogs that he follows (which now stands at over 2000). 2000! Amazing. The question becomes what other tools beyond RSS exist to help you identify these patterns and manage RSS? It seems that Scoble identifies stories manually by reviewing each blog that he follows from A to Z. Of course much of Scoble’s life is devoted to blogging and following RSS feeds as it relates to his blogging. What about the average guy? What about a guy that has only 30 minutes a day (aghast!) to follow feeds?

Where are the tools beyond RSS to further expedite and organize our information?

And what about if I want more — but I want more quality? At present my formula for adding blogs to my RSS reader consists of either stumbling upon a link when I’m reading one of the blogs that I already follow or scouring the feeds of bloggers that I consider insightful. Every so often I find something interesting from my sitemeter account when someone else links to me. And occasionally I’ll meet someone in person or by email and learn about their blog that way, but this is the exception rather than the rule.

The hard question for me is, how do I add feeds more intelligently? What about recommendation technology? For the most part I’ve never been impressed with recommendation technology. I remember about six years ago when my friend Marc first started telling me about the recommendation work that was going on at the company he was with, Net Perceptions. I was impressed but I’ve never seen recommendation technology really work. I don’t go to my TiVo’s suggested television because too consistently it serves up shows that I have no interest in. Similarly I’ve been less than impressed with what bloglines thinks I should also be adding. Amazon.com tries to be helpful but in general I haven’t found their recommendations compelling.

Is there any kind of AI that will work with recommendation or is the perceived value of a blog truly an unbelievably subjective experience that can only be recognized through a slow, tedious and manual personal review process?

What great blogs out there am I missing? I know that there are others as good and as insightful as Rubel’s and Scoble’s.

One Comment

One idea would be to feed a thousand RSS to a statistical engine that analyses the words and their distribution, and outputs clusters of similar or related stories. Google news does something like this right now. This sort of functionality needs to make it into desktop RSS readers.